August 2012 posts

If there exists a finer, more compelling argument for the need, necessity, and value of dedicated (i.e., professional), serious, deeply informed and literate critics and criticism in the arts and literature than the one written for The New Yorker titled "A Critic’s Manifesto" by Daniel Mendelsohn we've never encountered it.

An excerpt:

By dramatizing their own thinking on the page, by revealing the basis of their judgments and letting you glimpse the mechanisms by which they exercised their (individual, personal, quirky) taste, all these [professional] critics were, necessarily, implying that you could arrive at your own, quite different judgments—that a given work could operate on your own sensibility in a different way. What I was really learning from those critics each week was how to think. How to think (we use the term so often that we barely realize what we’re saying) critically — which is to say, how to think like a critic, how to judge things for myself. To think is to make judgments based on knowledge: period.

[...]

And so the fact is that (to invoke the popular saying) everyone is not a critic. This, in the end, may be the crux of the problem, and may help explain the unusual degree of violence in the reaction to the stridently negative reviews that appeared in the Times Book Review earlier this summer, triggering the heated debate about critics. In an essay about phony memoirs that I wrote a few years ago, I argued that great anger expressed against authors and publishers when traditionally published memoirs turn out to be phony was a kind of cultural displacement: what has made us all anxious about truth and accuracy in personal narrative is not so much the published memoirs that turn out to be false or exaggerated, which has often been the case, historically, but rather the unprecedented explosion of personal writing (and inaccuracy and falsehood) online, in Web sites and blogs and anonymous commentary—forums where there are no editors and fact-checkers and publishers to point an accusing finger at.

Similarly, I wonder whether the recent storm of discussion about criticism, the flurry of anxiety and debate about the proper place of positive and negative reviewing in the literary world, isn’t a by-product of the fact that criticism, in a way unimaginable even twenty years ago, has been taken out of the hands of the people who should be practicing it: true critics, people who, on the whole, know precisely how to wield a deadly zinger, and to what uses it is properly put. When, after hearing about them, I first read the reviews of Peck’s and Ohlin’s works, I had to laugh. Even the worst of the disparagements wielded by the reviewers in question paled in comparison to the groundless vituperation and ad hominem abuse you regularly encounter in Amazon.com reviews or the “comments” sections of literary publications. Yes, we’re all a bit sensitive to negative reviewing these days; but if you’re going to sit in judgment on anyone, it shouldn’t be the critics.

The RNC was (is) embarrassed by it, Mitt Romney's staff flummoxed, and the pundit class mostly negatively critical. From all accounts the speech was largely extemporaneous (no teleprompter and sans notes) and, in our view, on-message humorous: the lone oasis in a vast desert of (boring and predictable) bullshit shot-through with outright lies.

It was one of those need-to-watch-TV-cause-we're-bored-silly nights. Problem was, there was nothing on TV worth watching. And so, faute de mieux, we turned to New Jersey's PBS HD channel which was airing the Met's HD film of La Traviata in the staging by Willy Decker and vowed to watch the whole thing through no matter what, except in the case the voices were not more than merely competent in which case we would be done with it and watch the news on CNN instead.

The voices were indeed more than merely competent for the most part, the standouts being that white-haired Russian guy whose singing was spectacular and that French person who, after a somewhat rocky start, did honor to her role as principal protagonist. And it didn't hurt matters that this opera is the sort of opera that's mother's milk to conductor Fabio Luisi who did a splendid job in the pit.

And then there was the staging.

To put this in perspective, one must first ask oneself what Traviata is at bottom. And the most honest answer to that question is that Traviata is, at bottom, nothing more than a soap opera in the typical Italian-opera mold. Its music, Italian-opera-lovely as some of it is, and its text declare it so and no staging can transform it into something greater which, we suspect, is what Herr Decker attempted (unsuccessfully) to do with his staging which staging, we hasten to add, while decidedly Regietheater is NOT Konzept Regietheater (i.e., Eurotrash). The staging maintains throughout the concept of the opera's creator and does not attempt to substitute its own Konzept in place of it. It merely reimagines the realization of the opera creator's concept which is, of course, what makes it a Regietheater staging.

We found that elegant but starkly bare staging to be hockey-puck devoid of anything that could be called evocative or resonant, and found the sledgehammer-symbolism of that ever-present clock thing and the equally ever-present silent figure that's supposed to represent Death (yeah, yeah, we get it, Willy; her time is running out) embarrassingly hokey as was that sparse IKEA (or was it Walmart) furniture not to speak of all that singing while lying down or crawling about the floor.

Mr. Gelb, we suggest, should do lots more along the lines of vetting these stagings before committing the Met to live with them beyond their initial presentation. We wonder just how many seasons this vapid entry will have to run in order to amortize its cost.

So you, a musically well-educated musician, hear a piece of music new to you, are gobsmacked by it and passionately declare it a masterpiece. Your companion, an equally musically well-educated musician, disagrees. He says it's merely a pleasing, well-made piece of music. Do you imagine you could successfully defend your assessment of the piece as a masterpiece?

If you answered Yes, we suggest you think again and reflect on what the legendary teacher of composition Nadia Boulanger (and we here use the word "legendary" most advisedly) had to say on the matter:

I can distinguish music that is well-made and music that isn't. Yet, what distinguishes well-made music and a masterpiece, that I cannot tell. I won't say that [an objective criterion to distinguish the two] doesn't exist, but I don't know what it is. It all comes down to faith. As I accept God, I accept beauty, I accept emotion. I also accept masterpieces. There are conditions without which masterpieces cannot be achieved, but what defines a masterpiece cannot be pinned down.

Just so.

(The above quote was transcribed from a lovely film on Mademoiselle Boulanger by Bruno Monsaingeon which can be viewed here.)

We've always been contra Republicans generally (that party has more loony tunes and idiots per congressional district than does Byberry state mental hospital and a positively delusional fairytale economic ideology that's resulted ultimately in catastrophe of one sort or another wherever and whenever it's been freely implemented), but here's a more current specific reason to be contra Republicans this presidential election year.

From a leaked transcript of an upcoming cover story in Fortune magazine by Andy Serwer in New York and David Whitford in Boston, Politico reports the following gem from the lips of presumed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney:

“[F]irst there are programs I would eliminate [on becoming president]. Obamacare being one of them but also various subsidy programs — the Amtrak subsidy, the PBS subsidy, the subsidy for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities. Some of these things, like those endowment efforts and PBS I very much appreciate and like what they do in many cases, but I just think they have to stand on their own rather than receiving money borrowed from other countries, as our government does on their behalf. [emphasis ours]

So, not only delusional loony tunes and idiots, but woodenheaded philistines as well (does Mr. Romney actually imagine a meaningful savings of money would result from such cuts?).

Make certain y'all vote this coming November to ensure that not only are Republicans kept out of the White House, but that the Congress is cleansed of as many Republicans as possible.

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 5:35 PM Eastern on 16 Aug. See below.]

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 2:40 PM Eastern on 14 Aug to clarify certain points rhetorically made.]

Just finished watching the HD (720p) videos of the transmission from the Bayreuther Festspiele of Stefan Herheim's Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) staging of Parsifal (Eurotrash staging because presented as a staging of Wagner's Parsifal which it most decidedly is not) and it's just about as we expected, generally speaking, although we must say the staging was unexpectedly beautiful and beautifully executed, never mind that it has nothing to do with Wagner's Parsifal beyond being a deconstruction of and commentary on Wagner's music-drama; a deconstruction and commentary that hijacks the music and text of Wagner's Parsifal to serve its own purposes resulting in what is effectively a new opera.

What makes this Eurotrash staging remarkable is that it was, from the beginning (2008), lauded to the sky by audiences and critics alike, the latter presumably to avoid the risk of being looked upon as reactionary dinosaurs by pointing out its almost utter disregard of the concept of Wagner's music-drama — not a good thing for critics to be looked upon as — and the former, for who knows what reasons other than that Mr. Herheim's Konzept takes as its central idea the historical progress of Germany and the Bayreuther Festspiele itself from the last quarter of the 19th century forward, and makes Parsifal (the character) a stand-in for...that's right, you guessed it: Richard Wagner himself. A bit scandalous that last as one scene in Act I of this staging has Parsifal schtupping Herzeleide, his own mother (never mind that we know, or rather are expected to know, it's the shape-shifting Kundry).

And why do we interrupt our blogging hiatus to report this at this time? Because we don't know how long the the above linked HD videos will remain online. So for those interested, view them while the viewing is still good.

That is all. As you were.

Update (5:35 PM Eastern on 16 Aug): If our eMail is any indicator, we seem to have given the impression we object to this Konzept staging simply because it's a Konzept staging. That's not the case at all. We object to this Konzept staging for two reasons: first, because it's a fraud insofar as it's billed and promoted as a staging of Wagner's Parsifal which, as we've said, it most decidedly is not, and second, because it was presented at the Bayreuther Festspiele which is the very last place on Earth almost any Konzept staging of a Wagner opera or music-drama should be permitted. Had this otherwise excellent staging been billed and promoted honestly as what it actually is — viz., "Stefan Herheim's Parsifal: a deconstruction of and commentary on the music-drama of the same name by Richard Wagner using Wagner's music and text" — and presented at any opera venue in the world other than at the Bayreuther Festspiele, we would have had no objection to it at all, and in fact would have had many good things to say about it.

For the second time in the space of a month our hiatus from blogging is interrupted by the death of yet another irreplaceable artist whose passing we cannot let go without comment.

Gore Vidal — writer; public intellectual; notorious wit, provocateur, and celebrity figure — died yesterday at his home in Los Angeles from complications of pneumonia reports The New York Times. He was 86.

Mr. Vidal possessed an almost embarrassing abundance of gifts: handsome to the point of beautiful, his cutting acerbic wit and sharpness of intellect were wonders to behold on numerous occasions on television talk shows and on the lecture circuit. As if those weren't gifts sufficient, Mr. Vidal, one of this country's most prolific writers, was perhaps the most elegant writer this country has ever produced, a gift on display in his 25 novels and scads of essays too numerous to count, not to mention several plays and a number of TV dramas and Hollywood movies.

With Mr. Vidal's passing, the world has been deprived of one of its most accomplished artists.